Nick Fernandez / Android Authority
The era of PS3 emulation on Android is here! To some degree, at least.
Android emulation geeks are abuzz with excitement over aPS3e, the first native PS3 emulator for Android phones. Sure, most of the code appears to be cobbled together from open-source PS3 emulation projects like RPCS3, Vita3K, and Termux (probably breaking their licenses), but the fact that it’s working at all is a big step forward.
The app itself has now been removed from GitHub due to this controversy, but you can still download it from this Chinese host. Obviously, this opens up some risk of malware, so do so at your own risk.
So, how well is the emulator actually working? That’s what I’ve been testing for the last 48 hours, and the results are mixed.
Installation woes
Nick Fernandez / Android Authority
Anyone who’s tinkered with emulators on Android before knows things rarely work out of the box. You’ll frequently need to adjust settings and drivers to get the best performance, and often things still won’t work, despite your best efforts. This is especially true at the frontier of emulation, which includes the Nintendo Switch and, now, the PlayStation 3.
In a way, aPS3e makes things easier because it has no settings. The app is so new, and so barebones that there’s no settings menu at all. If a game works, it works; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. That’s almost a welcome change if you’re used to setting up Winlator containers.
However, there was one small trick required to get most games to work. While it can load both ISO and PKG files, the associated .rap files need to be manually moved to the aps3e/config/dev_hdd0/home/000000001/exdata directory. Only one game made it to the install screen without it, and I can’t tell you why for the life of me.
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